


we were hand to glove to cuff

by haloud



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alex Manes is an Unreliable Narrator, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Coma, Cuddling & Snuggling, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, i demand more xenobiology in my aliens and dont care if it makes perfect sense, light body horror, non-graphic mentions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:27:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22335598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: What do you do when paranoia isn’t enough? When you plan and you plan and put your entire life on hold to guard against the things you fear, then the second you turn your back, it happens anyway.Alex doesn't have the answer, but he's going to find one. No matter what it takes.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 45
Kudos: 200





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from quinine by dessa  
> \--------------  
> NOTE: 2/16: hey yall–
> 
> i’ve decided to split this fic into three chapters. no other editing or addition of content is taking place. this is just something i debated quite a bit both before posting it initially and after, and i’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s a stronger story with a built-in divide between the story’s three “acts”: the build-up, alex’s mission, and the conclusion.
> 
> so if you see it back at the top of the rnm ao3 feed, that’s why. this note is added for transparency's sake.

Jesse Manes has never been a particularly subtle man, except in the sense that bruises and welts can cause as much pain as fire without the evidence of scars.

“Something of yours fell by chance into my possession,” he says.

Flint opens the rear door of the vehicle.

“If you don’t want your toys broken, you should stop leaving them lying around.”

* * *

Michael’s body is cold and still.

Cold, the body that laid against him so hot he could hardly breathe, like breathing the first gasp of air out of a car sat baking in the sun. Like crushing a pepper between your teeth and feeling heat spread across your tongue, like coming in from the winter to sheets fresh from the dryer, that was Michael’s body against his—something so real, an offering to light itself, every fire against the dark, that was Michael’s heat.

Still, the body that was born so moving and kinetic it couldn’t stay contained in one form, had to spiral out of him to touch everything in the world. He was always fidgeting, fingers playing on the edge of whatever surface he could touch, along hems and seams and corners; he would bounce in place if he had something to say, lean and nod and flutter his eyes if he was flirting, always a coiled spring, potential energy made flesh.

Now here he is, in the bed in Jim’s old bunker, the closest thing to a hospital room they have for an alien. His pulse is weak and thready, and Alex digs his thumb harder into the space between the tendons of his wrist. For a second—a furious, helpless heartbeat before he can squash the thought, smash it to dust—he thinks: push harder, til it bruises, til anyone would cry out, make it hurt so it’s real, make him _wake **up—**_

“It’s like he’s in some sort of power saver mode,” Liz tries to explain.

Alex barely hears her, or the response Isobel throws at her. Because Michael is cold and still, and seeing him is worse than pain, it’s, it’s a nausea, a bone-deep wrongness, a _desecration,_ a _heresy._ Alex believed in something, and now it’s been—violated.

“It could be an unresponsive coma. We have no medical history for him at all, no way of knowing if he was in danger of a stroke or any sort of tumor or brain swelling, and without the ability to do any scans…” Kyle grimaces. “He has severe bruising to the face; brain injury is a possibility, and while there’s no presence of chemicals that could cause a medically induced coma in his blood, he does have marks from injections, and no way to know what an alien metabolism might do with some chemicals that my tests can’t pick up.”

Liz cuts in, “But the thing is—the feature common to all your cells, the iridescence and the odd structure, it seems stronger than ever—that’s why we think it’s an alien thing rather than a regular coma. It’s almost like those cells are being taken over or something.”

“I just want you to be prepared for the _possibility_ the answer isn’t alien—"

In the corner, hands hugging her elbows, fingernails gripping into the holes of her baggy sweater, Isobel snaps, “It isn’t _just a coma._ I’d have to—be near a coma patient, to be sure, but. I can.” She swallows and swallows. “I can _hear_ him, but it’s not him, it’s just like this. This sound, and I can’t tell if it’s mechanical or organic, but it sounds like.” Her eyes, wide and so white, lift from Michael for the first time to look straight at Max, “It sounds like pressing your ear up to one of the pods. It sounds like that. I hate it, Max, I hate it, it’s not him—"

Max rushes to his sister, squeezes her tight, her gripping his back while they shudder together. The conversation flows around Alex in fits and starts, Max’s voice breaking over every word, and Alex just. He tunes it out. The alternative is arming himself for battle, and he knows, all his training, he knows, what happens when someone is compromised. Unable to do their job. Unable to uphold their share of the burden.

Eventually people file out. They leave him. Maria goes first. She has a business to run, a mother to support. Alex grabs her hand as she passes him and squeezes it, and she looks down at him with her tear-washed face. He doesn’t have any words—it’s all he can do—and Maria seems to understand, wiping her eyes and squeezing him back before heading for the ladder.

Max grips his shoulder, nails digging into his meat, the kind of rough grip you give to a grieving brother. Liz hugs him, squeezes hard when he doesn’t react, then lets him go. Her face is focused already when she walks away, mind latched onto her mission. Kyle and Isobel stay longer, folded together in the corner, his hands curved over her shoulders, thumbs fit sweetly against her clavicles barely exposed by the wide neck of her sweater, and her mouth is a solid line, but Kyle’s is parted, gentle, as he speaks to her. Alex can’t hear the words, but he doesn’t need to. Kyle is a doctor, and his words are better suited for a woman losing her brother than for a man losing his--well. Kyle is no stranger, either, to bereaved partners, but to quantify now, anything and everything Michael is to Alex--

He stops that line of thought with a tourniquet.

Kyle and Isobel leave, his hand hovering over the small of her back, and Alex knows that reassuring touch, is glad for Isobel to have it, though he suspects she’s more like him than either of them otherwise might realize, and reassurance is a baited trap, in need of preparation to chew her own arm off to escape.

And then Alex is alone.

There’s dirt smeared in swathes across Michael’s face, ground into the white collar of his shirt, mud flaked in his matted curls. There hasn’t been time--Alex hasn’t--someone should do him the dignity of cleaning him up, but Alex’s hands shake so badly when he fills a basin with water that he mostly sloshes it all over himself and falls back into his seat shivering on top of the fear and exhaustion rattling his bones.

Still, he has to do something. He has to try. He gets mud all over his hands, and it feels like a victory. It itches as it dries, and it gives him something else to focus on, something other than Michael’s eyes, closed, bluesmoke bruising on his eyelids and down his cheek, and the anger that eats at him in his stomach, acid and ugly, from the thoughts that he can’t stop--fists, boots, men both faceless and all wearing the face of his father and all the familiar ways that face moves and twists right before the moment of dizzy pain--or, the bruises, did they just happen when his strings were cut? When he hit the ground?

If he ever wakes up, maybe Alex can ask him. He can’t stand a mystery, after all.

He has his watch, he has his phone, but looking at either of them feels like a surrender. Time passing, minutes and hours that he should be able to hold at bay, to hold the line against losing time that should be spent with Michael. Who’s been keeping up with the work at Sanders’? Did Michael have any experiments in progress, and who is keeping them from getting spoiled? Is anyone taking care of his truck? Should anyone--no, no, they shouldn’t, because what if they get it wrong, and, and--

This vigil feels like a surrender too. To how useless he is, that no skill he’s earned over his lifetime can help Kyle or Liz find a solution, that no fight he’s ever won or lost has meant a single thing. Even the things they got right, the bridges woven between them with careful hands, the honest day’s work lain into each other. They still ended up here, with Michael dying, or--and Alex watching. Helpless.

It took a week. Only a week. Neither of them wanted to call it a test, but it was, for both of them. A week, Alex on loan to give a series of lectures in Virginia. The understanding that he’d be back, that even if it was Alex’s work separating them again, it wasn’t like before.

One week. A layover in Atlanta, sticky with sweat from the crowd and the air, his phone jammed between his shoulder and ear and Michael’s voice crackling on the other end like caramel, burning and brittle, while he told Alex he was going on some retreat with his siblings to work on their powers and not to worry if he went kinda radio silent, that he’d be checking in when he could.

Seems like a good time, he’d said, a good way to keep himself busy.

One week.

Alex wipes his hands raw on his own soaked shirt, red and stiff and aching until he’s ready to reach out and touch Michael, return his fingers to the point of his phantom pulse, to torture himself, unable to tell what’s real and what’s a defensive psychosomatic effect spun up by his spun out mind, tricking him to keep Michael alive for him.

Did Dad or Flint or whoever laugh when Alex wasn’t there in twenty-four hours, when Alex (stupid, careless, naïve), wasn’t there to rip his fucking spine out through his mouth for whatever he did to make Michael make that call?

It’s useless to wonder now, of course, it only serves to torture himself, wondering which of the marks on Michael’s still, cold body it was that convinced him, or if it was something else. But the uselessness of it all doesn’t stop Alex from fitting the pad of his thumb against the puncture mark over Michael’s carotid.

What do you do when paranoia isn’t enough? When you live a lifetime of growing horns and growing them sharp and still end up back at square one, trembling in the headlights?

“How am I supposed to be anything but angry? At my father, at my brothers, at myself, this whole shitty planet, and” Alex asks, voice like sand, rough and shifting in tone on every word, “I’m so angry at you, Guerin.”

There should be some sort of feedback, something to hear but the dying resonance of his own words, but there’s nothing. No beeping or clicking of machinery like you might find in a normal hospital room. Not even the sound of Michael’s breathing.

“And you can’t even hear me, so I’m not especially inclined to even try at being fair. How the fuck could you do this to me, Michael? After all the time you spent studying everything you could about your kind, how did you overlook _this?_ Your fucking off switch? And my father—after all the torture and experiments, how did _he_ not know this was a possibility?”

Alex chokes on his next words, half sob, half gagging nausea, until he can breathe it down, like he learned to do so long ago.

“Just once, could you not be one of a kind? I can’t believe you fucking stubborned your way into a coma, that’s fucking incredible, you—” An ugly laugh bubbles up through his nose. “—you fucking asshole. If you ever wake up I’m going to kick your ass.”

Alex’s answer comes in the faint rise and fall of Michael’s chest. After all the nights he spent by Michael’s side, all the time when they had nothing _but_ nights, and Alex had nothing but forcing himself to stay awake so tomorrow never became real, Michael has never slept so even or so still. He’s always been as difficult at night as he is during the day. He twists and turns in the sheets seeking any source of heat; he hogs the blankets, he makes sweet, sleepy little noises with his mouth mashed against Alex’s shoulder.

More than anything else, the cold and the stillness are the evidence that Michael didn’t choose this, that it was either an accident or it was forced on him. Michael might sacrifice himself, might break his own bones and tear his own skin trying to escape a trap, but he would never choose this, this waxlike sleep.

Alex picks up his hand, traces the familiar callouses, the smooth scar on his right thumb from a hot engine block, the notch in the webbing between his third and fourth fingers where he caught it on a shard of broken glass one drunken night. Alex teased these stories out of him bit by agonizing bit, re-lancing his own stubborn old wounds in turn, from the circumstantial to the catastrophic and everywhere in between.

“You’re going to wake up, Guerin.”

He has to. Alex can accept no other options.

* * *

He falls asleep like that, holding Michael’s cold, still hand. Awake one moment, studying the fine pattern of hair from his wrist to the soft crease of his elbow, studying the finery of veins everywhere his skin is thinnest. He has to stay awake, he has to, has to be there when the bruises start to change color, and his veins, and his lips and the end of his fingers. Kyle and Liz are there, sometimes, in the corners, by the bed, taking notes, but that’s not good enough, no one but him is good enough, watches hard enough to know the moment the clock ticks over midnight on the life somehow still flickering in his chest.

Awake one moment, the next he’s gone, swept away by jet lag and grief and childhood dreams, dreams of hell inside his father’s house, and Michael outside the window with glass-white eyes, left hand drip, drip, dripping blood.

He wakes with a shock a couple hours later, and Michael is still alive.

So at least there’s that.

He wakes up with a hospital blanket over his shoulders and a cup of coffee from the Crashdown on the table beside him, and his heart lurches like an elevator dropping one story, numbness washing through him just for a _second._

He wants to. Wants to fucking slap the scalding coffee off the table, see it splash across the floor, crush the cup beneath his heel, throw the blanket down in the mess, and fuck, _fuck_ he’s glad Kyle and Liz aren’t here to see him, to add their voices to the furious buzzing in his ears until he can _breathe_ his way down.

Great, yeah, sure, great show of fuckin’ support, because that’s exactly what he needs—what he deserves—shower him in creature comforts, because that will fix the fact that he’s a failure.

Breathe. Fucking _breathe._

They’re just trying to help.

Liz knows what you’re going through. She’s the only one who does.

People care about you. It’s basic consideration, not an insult.

Breathe.

Closing his eyes, Alex forces air into his chest, forces his shoulders to drop, his jaw to unclench. By the time he opens his eyes again, his anger is firmly under control again.

And the first thing he sees is Michael’s face, cheek raw and swollen and split over the bone and greening around the edges of the bruise.

“What do you do when paranoia isn’t enough?” He says aloud.

“What do you do when you plan and you plan and put your entire life on hold to guard against the things you fear, then the _second_ you turn your back, it happens anyway? How does a person live like that? I thought I knew. I thought I had it under control. But that was a stupid mistake. He’s never loved anything like how he loves reminding me I don’t control jack shit.”

In the dim underground light, Michael’s hair is dull and limp against his forehead, where it’s dry, no sheen of fever sweat, no clammy film of illness or injury, no sign that his body is fighting at all. If the room had proper lighting, Alex could at least comfort himself by picking out the threads of gold in his hair, and find pieces of his Michael there. He shoots the closest lamp an ugly look and, not for the first time since he stopped indulging the lost-child part of him sobbing with gratitude for the home Jim left for him, wonders what the hell Valenti was thinking with this setup, how he’d hoped to provide medical care down here.

Still, it’s the best they’ve got. And there’s something rewarding, at least, in the savage pleasure Kyle seems to be taking in putting this room to this use—saving an alien’s life.

The hatch opens behind him with a creak that pricks Alex’s ears and sends his stomach into knots. He’d been avoiding—he has no way, he has no plan, for how to grieve with company. How to brace himself for sympathy. How to lock away the cornered animal crouched on Michael’s chest and keep it from biting or bolting.

“Knock knock,” Maria calls from the top of the ladder, and Alex breathes a sigh of relief. Half because it’s Maria, one of his people, and half out of the split second she’s given him to prepare himself accordingly.

Still up top, she says, “Could you come to the bottom of the ladder? I have some stuff to bring down.”

Pushing himself off the chair, Alex staggers a step, catches himself on the foot of the bed, and he has to breathe through it again, the black rage darkening the edges of his mind. Inward, outward, it’s just waiting to combust, and he keeps feeding it--has he not learned, by now, how stupid it is to fall asleep without taking care of his leg? And especially now, in times like these, when he needs his body in top shape, in case…

What? In case of what? In case his father kidnaps and tortures another person he loves? Because he was so helpful the last time. In case he’s needed for the rigorous activity of lurking in the corners of Liz’s lab, distracting her while she works; in case he needs to get down on his knees and beg her to find a solution?

Maria. Maria, at least, needs him right now, even if it’s for something trivial, at the very least it’s for something alive. He breathes, and it does nothing for the throbbing, stiff agony in his leg, but the measured counting, the practiced machinery of his lungs, at least helps to clear his mind.

“Actually, nevermind,” she says, just as Alex was about to grit his teeth and try to put weight back on his leg. He gets himself upright at the same time she descends the ladder, pausing halfway down to pull something with her.

“There’s a bunch more stuff up there, but it can wait until Kyle and Liz get here; they’re on their way. Or I can take it back with me when I leave again, I just...anyway, here are the essentials.” 

The first thing she holds out to him are his crutches, and he could kiss her.

“I noticed you didn’t have them, so. And I fed Buffy and let her out, so don’t worry.” She sets her bag down on the foot of the bed, twists her hands in front of her, then speaks to fill the silence. “I brought ibuprofen, a blanket, your laptop, phone charger, and like two hundred dollars worth of tequila. The stuff upstairs is mostly more food. And more booze. And for some reason I brought a four pack of nail polish remover, even though--” Her voice catches in her throat and shatters into pieces.

“Hey,” Alex says, reaching out and cupping her shoulders. He doesn’t have any words for her, not like Michael would, but sometimes holding her is what she needs the most. It was true even in high school, even earlier, middle, elementary, when Mimi would meet her at the bus stop and no matter what the school day had been like, Alex would stand there with his thumbs jammed against the straps of his backpack and watch Maria jump into her mother’s arms.

Maria ducks her head, looks past him to the bed, tears already streaking her cheeks, a dead little smile shaping her face. “You know, I was driving over here? And I had all this stuff in the passenger seat and I was trying to laugh at myself for overcompensating so hard and then I was like oh, whatever, you worry too much, Michael can get it down the ladder with his brain.” An awful rattle shakes her shoulders, and Alex pulls her close and folds her into a hug.

After a couple minutes, Alex’s cheek against the top of her head, her face buried in his chest, she pulls away and wipes her eyes and says in a steady voice, “Okay. Now. How are you holding up? What do you need, Alex?”

“There hasn’t been any change. Just...stillness. It’s coming up on forty-eight hours.”

“That’s not the question I asked. But okay.”

She rubs his shoulder gently, not asking for anything more, and he has to look away from the tenderness and understanding in her red-rimmed eyes. He sits back down, slowly so as not to jar himself, and stares at the bedding instead, trying to focus on the pattern, not on the shape of Michael’s legs beneath it. Maria pulls another chair around to sit beside him, her hand palm up on her leg, inviting his hand in hers if he wants to reach out. He picks at a loose thread in the quilt instead.

“I can’t stop my mind from running the scenario. Over and over again. Signs I should have noticed. Times I should have checked in. What I could have done to…” Alex sighs and lets the sentence trail off. What he could have done to save him? The words stick in his throat, too shy to come out. When has he ever been anyone’s savior?

“Alex,” Maria says. “ _None_ of us did anything. It…it isn’t strange for any of us to go days without talking to him, y’know? You know how he is about his phone, the kind of hours he spends at work and in his lab. By the time we realized _no one_ had heard from him and started to worry, it was already—it was already too late.”

Alex just shakes his head wordlessly. It doesn’t matter what anyone else did or didn’t do. It only matters that he wasn’t there. That Michael was suffering while he ordered room service on the other side of the country. And now, this helplessness in the aftermath. He doesn’t even try to search for the words to tell Maria _how he’s feeling._ It would just tear them both to pieces.

Instead, he reaches out to take Michael’s hand again, needing to feel the texture of his skin and the flicker of his pulse, counting the beats to keep his head from spinning. Even if the coldness is all wrong, it’s still Michael. Idly, Alex strokes his index finger against those knuckles, the neatness of them where they used to be twisted and stiff, and plays a game where he sorts things into boxes, the before, the after, the present, and all the subtle differences in the way this hand has touched him.

Maria is quiet beside him, and some sublevel of his mind files a report to express his gratitude for her company, whenever he can get around to it. While he processes that paperwork, he turns Michael’s hand over to trace the lines of his palm instead, to—

He pauses, tilts his head to the side. He blinks. Blinks again.

In Roswell, you get used to seeing unusual things. He loved an alien. He touched a piece of extraterrestrial glass and it shimmered underneath his hand. Rosa lived and breathed again, and he took it on the chin.

What’s one more impossible phenomenon? Why should any one thing break his comprehension any more than any other? There are questions he should ask and puzzle out the answers to, but here he is locked in standstill, incapable of anything but a vast and spreading blankness buzzing in his ears.

Something milky and golden stretches webbed across Michael’s palm. It’s smooth and somehow hard and soft at once, an unnatural metallic crispness but with the giving roughness of Michael’s skin beneath it. There’s no seam that he can see or feel when he scrapes his nails against it, no natural joining of flesh and not-flesh, no grafting scar, nothing. No matter the fact that it wasn’t there a few hours ago when Alex thought of nothing but holding this hand until it could hold him back again.

“Alex?” Maria’s voice is tight. “What the fuck is that?”

Something just…breaks in Alex, then. He lunges into Michael’s prone body, ripping, digging his nails into that _thing,_ trying to get it _off,_ get it _off him—_ Michael—Maria is screaming somewhere to his right, but his blood is roaring too loudly in his ears to make out the words, and the drag of his fingernails raises welts on Michael’s palm, catches, draws blood, but Michael, Michael has no voice to say anything at all.

Maria wraps her arms around his middle, tries to drag him away, but he can’t let her, he _can’t,_ someone has to do something—

It’s wrong. It’s wrong for there to be something on Michael’s skin, something not him, something— _alien?_ A nasty voice asks in his mind, and Alex jerks harder against Maria’s grip in response, jerking out of her arms entirely. It doesn’t matter, alien, it doesn’t _matter,_ it’s wrong, because he’d know, he’d know what’s _Michael_ and what’s something else, something that might be _killing him._

A noise, upstairs, and Maria cries out “ _Down here!”_ with a desperate crack in her voice, and Alex is scraping, scraping against Michael’s palm again, again, when the hatch flies open and there are voices on the ladder and then Kyle and Liz are there too, all three of them babbling in his ear and hauling him backwards and, and,

He sags in Kyle’s arms, drops his forehead into one bloodied hand, and sobs.

* * *

Alex’s hands are cold around the edges of the blanket, but he doesn’t feel like moving them with the brown rime of drying blood beneath his nails. His eyes feel sunken inside his skull, and he stares dully at the floor. Thoughts fight through the white noise in his head just to break against the rocks and go to chaos all over again. He hasn’t gone near the bed since his friends forced him away; he huddles in the corner with the best vantage point of the room.

New tests. Liz and Kyle’s voices fold over each other, planning, grasping for anything that looks like progress. Max comes in at some point, and out of everything, everything he could be doing or thinking or saying or listening to, it’s that that provokes a response, a flicker of irritation in Alex’s chest at the people barging in and out of his house. Kyle lifts Michael’s wrist with a gloved hand and prods at the shimmer in the shadowed curve of his palm for a third time, a fourth time. The raised and ragged scratches left by Alex’s nails blend into the alien mass. If it spreads and thickens like Kyle and Liz are discussing, those marks will be hidden away and untouchable long before they actually heal.

“Let me _try,”_ Max says in a voice like thunder, “Just a—a jolt, I haven’t yet, maybe it would work! I can’t do nothing—”

Kyle fires back, “It’s starting in the left hand and neck, Max, why do you think that is?”

“Are you saying that _I—"_

And Liz says, “No! But we can’t _ignore_ it either. With the activity in his cells, it would be too dangerous to introduce more energy to his system.”

“I can’t do _nothing—”_

Kyle says, “We’re not doing nothing. We’re trying to do whatever we can that won’t just make everything worse.”

“Look,” Liz says, interrupting the building argument, “I only have one real hypothesis, and it isn’t one I know what to do with. We have to decide on our next step, okay?” Max and Kyle quiet, and she continues. “I tried to take scrapings of the substance but couldn’t pick anything up. Absolutely nothing. The only other substance I’ve encountered that has _no_ residue of any kind is the surface of your pods.” She swallows. “Michael and I debated it, but we never came up with an answer as to whether they were synthetic or organic. But I—I think we’re looking at the answer.”

A deafening silence falls. Isobel, who so far has been pale and speechless sitting beside Michael’s bed, breaks it.

“I believe you,” she says. “I went to the cave with our pods to listen, and I was right. He sounds like them.”

“Right,” Liz says, and barrels on, “This, this coma, it could be similar to the stasis-like state you enter into when inside one of them. And the way the iridescent cells are taking over, if his body is redirecting its regular functions to this new function as a defense mechanism, that activity would make a kind of sense. I think.” Liz takes a deep breath. “I think the pods aren’t eggs at all. I think they’re _cocoons._ ”

Alex’s ears are ringing from his racing heart, from the bolt of panic that locks down his muscles when everyone starts talking loudly at once. Kyle is between him and the ladder and escape. Maria left for some air as soon as Alex was calmed, but even without her there are too many bodies in this space for Alex to track all at once, and he’s unarmed, helpless. Max is between him and Michael. No matter which way he bolted, torn in half by his instincts, he would have to fight and might not make it in time.

“At this rate of spread…”

“One week. We’d have to track fluctuations.”

“…Try. Silver? Worth a shot.”

“The serum…”

“Alex?”

He jumps. Shakes his head to clear it. Lost time, somewhere in there in the cloud of conversation, blacked time in a whine clenched between his teeth while he let other people figure out how to save Michael. His responsibility. His. Falling apart.

Kyle doesn’t speak with pity, but with the even confidence of a man well-versed in the worst sort of grief. It’s part of what makes him such a good doctor. Even Alex, without anything else to be, can’t be angry at being treated with gentleness.

“Shouldn’t you be part of the committee?”

He doesn’t even recognize his own voice, a flat dull thing that reaches his ears at some point too late to have come from within his own skull.

Locked in an argument, Isobel says, “And what, just let it _run its course?_ Have you forgotten that the _last_ time something pod-related and unexplained happened, we were stuck for fifty years and had no _memories_ when we got out?”

Liz responds, “Of course not! We had this same debate about _you_ when the serum was killing you. But if silver still passes right through the membrane when it’s growing, how would we get him inside—"

Kyle says, quiet and just to Alex, “They can make do for a few minutes. Can I take a look at your leg?”

“It needs to come off. Seized up after I fell asleep in the chair. Stretches and rest and it’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Are the camp beds we used to sleep in still here somewhere? I’ll get everyone out of here and set one up so you can get some actual rest.”

“Fine.”

Alex closes his eyes. Keeps them closed while the voices fade and while they return, Kyle and Maria setting up the cot before leaving again, paying him—what, respect? And not saying a word the entire time, not to him or to each other.

Eventually, the hatch swings shut behind them, and Alex is alone.

He takes his pants off. One of the two of them left a folded pair of sweats beside his crutches, and he changes, moving robotically through the steps of removing his leg and every minute detail of every aching stretch he learned in PT. Then he downs two painkillers, turns off the light, and lays himself down.

Golden light glows from Michael’s position in the room, faint and spotty enough to be a trick played by over-lighted eyes. Alex blinks and blinks, but it never goes away.

The light is just barely bright enough to outline the shape of the coffee cup on the bedside table, untouched from hours ago, and seeing it shifts some unbroken part inside of Alex and crushes it to dust.

For ten years, Alex never let himself imagine a future with Michael. It was too much, too big; feeding it would destroy him, turn him into a husk. So he starved that hope, kept it away from sun and water. Still, he never managed to kill it entirely, though it bore only bitter fruit.

Until now. Until recently, when he’s held Michael for more than one night in a row and woken to a mouthful of curls. Until he’s been a man who has a man who does domestic things, like discovering he has a favorite type of danish and making them again and again until he gets them right.

And now—now what? Now, after he’s dragged that bitterness into the light and nursed it, coaxed it into something sweet, the shock of care is finally what kills it?

God, being alone with his thoughts is fucking maudlin. Not wanting to spend the entire night wallowing, staring at the outline of a paper cup and imagining a hundred thousand more paper cup nights in this fucking hole in the ground, Alex sits up, swings himself over the edge of the cot, goes to Michael on the bed, and crawls into the space beside him.

Cold. But still, Alex turns his face into Michael’s shoulder, breathes him in, and waits out the first of many.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

Sometime during that night, something shifts inside him. Credit it to some indefinite, unremembered dream, credit it to the effects of rest on the brain’s ability to make decisions. Because he _rests_ that night. Something at the deepest core of him settles and is restored by his skin on Michael’s, even when everything is wrong.

When he wakes up, he has clarity.

He can’t. He can’t fucking sit there and listen to everyone argue over Michael like he’s a specimen in a lab; he can’t fucking sit there knowing that is truly the best anyone can do for him. He can’t sit there having nothing better to give him.

But. There are a productive things he _can_ do.

So he leaves when the sun comes up, his decision made by the ability to put weight on his leg without wincing. He leaves before anyone can see him—anyone but Kyle, who he finds sleeping on his couch, who he shakes awake and orders to take care of Buffy while he’s gone.

Kyle stares at him with serious black eyes, searching his face for a long moment before seizing his upper arms in a bruising grip, nodding grimly, and saying, “Take care of _yourself.”_

One week. No one begs him to come back.

Maybe they sense that he needs this. The freedom and cold clarity of purpose, the distance between himself and reality. Maybe no news is good news, and Michael is floating peacefully under two layers of his people’s protection while Liz grows closer and closer to working another miracle.

Or maybe no one knows how to tell him that it’s over through the phone.

Maybe the ashes will sit easier on his tongue if he writes an ending of his own before he finds out.

He starts at the old Project Shepherd bunker, a convenient base of operations already containing within its systems most of the information he needs to know in the form of a web of individuals and influence he’s been compiling for months, tracing known operatives through side projects in every branch of the military and into civilian science and government, too. He even gave himself a little side project, earmarking particularly blackmailable people as likely targets for his father’s influence.

It’s child’s play to pick out who among those people had leave that matched up with the week Flint was on loan, too. He’ll start at the center of the web and work his way out.

Until it’s done.

He passes the sign for Roswell city limits and feels nothing. There is no tether on his soul telling him where he belongs, no more than there ever was. The man inside him yearning to be by Michael’s side knows how to keep himself quiet, after all these years.

He drives. He doesn’t play the radio, doesn’t need a GPS to find his way. He drives until he stops in front of a nondescript adobe-style house, pauses a moment with the car off to put on his gloves, grabs his crutch, and walks to the door.

Alex makes himself coffee in Frank Walker’s kitchen and sits on his couch waiting for the man to wake up. He doesn’t know what’s more laughable; that he was so easily able to execute the same move that took his father out on one of his top men, or the thought of Jesse Manes sitting his lackeys down to warn them to defend themselves from his gay, crippled son wielding a crutch with debilitating force.

Walker comes to slowly, blinking the dizzy blink of the mildly concussed. His body seizes the second he realizes he’s restrained, head jerking up, his posture a stiff-backed shock and his face dark with a stony glare Alex is well familiar with himself. He puts his coffee aside , puts his hands on his knees, and smiles.

“Good afternoon, Airman. I have a few questions for you.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Call me a concerned citizen.”

“Bullshit!”

Alex clicks his tongue softly. “I won’t waste much of your time, Mr. Walker. I’d apologize for the restraints, but I’m not any sorrier about them than you are about the multiple hate crimes you’ve been charged with, only for those charges to be abruptly dropped and then expunged. _Or_ the arsenal of illegal, unregistered firearms in this house. Now. I must have been overlooked, because I didn’t get the email with this month’s password to the secret club, so I’ll have to be frank. What can you tell me about the recent activities of Project Shepherd?”

“Never heard of it.”

Alex rolls his eyes. “I already said I wouldn’t waste your time, and I’d appreciate it if you did the same. I know, Walker, even if Master Sergeant Manes never brought me in on this op. He’d never think I was _strong_ enough to handle it. To do what had to be done. And he’d be right.”

Walker narrows his eyes and says nothing.

Alright, then. Alex reaches into his pocket and pulls out the syringe containing Liz’s alien-killing serum. “This? Has only ever been used on aliens. Its effect on them was…considerable. I have no idea what it might do to a human being. But I’m not going to inject you with it.”

Walker’s breath catches, his eyes flicking up to Alex’s for a second before he looks away again, straight forward.

“No, that’s the difference between me and him. I have morals. Standards. A friend of mine might call it a _code._ So here’s how this is going to go down.”

Alex puts the syringe on the table between them. It _clicks_ when it hits the table. Walker twitches violently, and Alex lets the ghost of a smile settle on his face.

“I’ve put my weapon down. You can try to overpower me and take it, inject me with it to get away, or run back to Manes and see what reward you can get for bringing him external alien research. But I’ll warn you before you make your choice—” Alex picks up his phone, says “Smile,” and snaps a picture. “—Try any of those things, and I’ll send this directly to my father. Do you think he’ll ever trust you again after he knows I could get to you? Do you think he’ll believe you when you say you didn’t tell me anything? Oh, he might not eliminate you straight away, no, that would be wasteful—but you won’t be useful to him anymore. Expendable. How well do you know the Master Sergeant, Walker? Do you know what happens to people who are expendable to him? Because I know what happened to an entire prison full of them out in the desert. ”

Walker’s face turns a fascinating shade of oatmeal. He doesn’t take his eyes off the syringe. His breath saws in and out of his chest as Alex stands, pulls out his pocketknife, and walks to stand behind him.

“Let’s try and have a more polite conversation, now,” he says, and slices through the ties.

Walker is up like a shot, lunging for the table. It’s an impressive attempt, though little else. He goes down hard when Alex seizes his elbow and twists his arm up behind his back, forcing him down to his knees, and _screams_ when something goes pop in his shoulder.

“Okay. We’ll do it this way instead.”

“You said I had a _choice!”_

“I said you could _try_ to overpower me. And you failed, Walker. What is the Master Sergeant going to say?”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—”

“Doubt it. Dear old dad thinks he’s too good to swear like a _common_ man.”

_“D-dad?”_

Alex laughs, high on the edge of adrenaline, at the terrified confusion in Walker’s voice

“Oh yes. And you’re going to tell me what he wanted. You’re going to tell me what he learned. And then you’re going to tell me where to find those records.”

“There aren’t any records—"

Alex ratchets up the pressure on Walker’s arm and he chokes off a pitiful, animal sound, and Alex hisses, “He was taken for a reason. It wasn’t just to torture me; that’s a pleasant side effect for my father, but he wouldn’t have gone to the trouble without something that fit his own agenda. Tell me!”

“Fuck! There were never any specimens submerged in human cultures before it. S-so we were doing psych evals, IQ testing, testing both human and alien knowledge and skills. It was fucking eerie how similar to us it was! Even the other subjects, they had shit setting them apart from people. But this one…we weren’t going to learn anything from it we didn’t learn from the original population of specimens. It was underdeveloped in the ways our research cared about. S-so we sent it along for interrogation. To learn what it was planning, why it had been crafted for infiltration.”

“Very good. Now. The records.”

“I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t know!” He shouts that last instead of babbling it, when Alex applies just the _barest_ more pressure. “All I know is that our reports all went through Manes!”

“Manes. Fantastic.”

He drops Walker, who screams behind his clenched teeth again at the jolt the motion sends through his arm, and steps over him, pocketing the syringe and checking his phone while Walker pulls himself upright, white-faced with pain and desperation.

“You gonna kill me, then?” he demands.

“Why would I do that? I don’t have time for that kind of cleanup.” He presses send on the picture of Walker tied to the chair, then pockets his phone as well. “I’m sure someone will be by shortly.”

He leaves Walker cursing, hears feet thundering behind him in pursuit, but Alex doesn’t even bother looking back.

The road doesn’t matter; the beds his back barely touches before the sun rises again don’t matter. He allows for a part of himself to be worried at the nothing in his head, but that allowance aside he revels in the silence. There is no ticking clock. It’s locked away. He does not count the sunsets.

One week.

Maybe the shell of the pod spreads itself over the whole body first in fine webbing. How many layers does it take before the shape of the body within is hidden, before it takes on the teardrop structure? At what point does the fluid inside begin to secrete? If it dissolves instantly in Earth’s atmosphere, can the transformation even take place, or is the initial webbing stage meant to create a barrier for just that purpose?

It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. He has no answers, and it wouldn’t matter even if he did.

Alex sits down on a crate and rests his gun on his knee. His favorite brother looks up at him with blankness in his eyes, the old dispassion that comes with inevitability. The look of being twelve and at attention for twelve hours, knowing the first one to flinch would be—punished.

Flint says in their father’s voice, “He screamed, you know. I wasn’t on site any more than you were, but I saw the tape. He _screamed_ for you until his fucking throat ruptured.”

He punctuates it by spitting at Alex’s feet, but it’s that, those transplanted words, that disgusts Alex.

“The thing is,” Alex leans in close, so close he can smell Flint’s breath, quick and shallow with pain despite all his admirable stoicism. “I don’t need to know if he screamed. He could have spent the entire time sipping mimosas with the Roswell bridge club and I would still blow your kneecap off and leave you here to _crawl_ your way to safety if you don’t tell me where I can find the research.”

Flint’s mouth tightens bloodless, gray, and he looks away, jaw firm.

“Do you think Daddy will still love you if you’ve only got one leg? That ship had sailed by the time I got the chance to find out, but I’m pretty curious.”

“You’ve fucking cracked!”

“ _Tell. Me._ You think whatever Dad’s got on you is bad? There’s _nothing_ you’ve ever fucking done that I can’t find. There’s nowhere to hide from me. I will hunt you to the end of the _fucking_ Earth before I let you profit off a _cent_ bought with his blood. Do you hear me?”

Flint laughs a bloody-toothed laugh. “Too late! I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you alright, you might as well have it as a consolation prize, because if that’s your goal you’ve already lost. He’s bagged and tagged, Alex! But hey, if you make it through the whole tape you might be able to find out its ID—"

For a second, for just a _second,_ a rage so black grips him, pins him, whispers in his ear _pullthetrigger,_ and he _wants_ to, he fucking wants to, he wants to give in just to punish Flint, himself, and the whole fucking world for the image of Michael, a specimen behind glass, a letter and number.

But the moment passes, clears, like a ragged scab leaving behind silver scar tissue, with only a whisper of regret that he didn’t even get off a warning shot, the kind that might have made Flint piss himself.

“Tell me, then,” he says, and Flint does. Thank god even he isn’t boring enough to bluff; Alex already knows that they were working with a skeleton crew and, considering his father’s continued distrust of the digital realm, there probably aren’t any real backups.

He drives. Flint gives directions. A storage unit to a different storage unit twenty miles away. Flint is quiet while Alex multitasks, shoving hard drives into his bag while keeping his gun on the hostage.

When he’s done, he puts Flint on his knees and puts the key to the unit around his own neck. Dad will come find him when he doesn’t check in; he’ll just have to live with himself until then.

“You know, Alex, I really am sorry,” Flint says when Alex crosses the threshold, turns to slam the gate down behind him.

He pauses. Shouldn’t have. But call him sentimental.

“But _someone_ has to ask the questions. It doesn’t make _sense_ for them to look like us. Things don’t happen for no reason! I’m _sorry_ that he means so much to you. That we couldn’t protect you; that this had to happen. But it was always going to end this way!”

Alex tilts his head. Flint stares back at him from his knees, eyes showing whites all around his irises, open and beseeching, utterly lacking in artifice.

“We’re your family, Alex. We can help you. If you just follow Dad’s orders when it really matters, it doesn’t have to be like it was when we were kids! I even, I mean, I served with guys like you, I can even set you up—”

Alex slams the grate closed so hard his teeth rattle in his skull.

Walker was an idiot, Flint, predictable, but Walter Davies, the third man on Alex’s list, is a more difficult man to find, mostly because he was a man with very few connections. Even Flint, product of their father’s teaching that he was, had something—acquaintances, habits, hell, New Roswell’s old football coach, who bloviated for forty-five minutes on the career of a young man he once considered himself a mentor to. Places for Alex to wriggle his way into a target’s life and find him there for the picking at the center of it. Davies, though? Nothing. Nada. Emptier and flimsier than any constructed fugitive identity Alex has ever seen. A near-pathological avoidance of routine and no family except an ex-wife and a daughter dead under suspicious circumstances—but nothing that could be pinned on Davies, of course. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize what made the man useful to Alex’s father. What leverage could be applied to a man with that life and that history.

Time passes, in the same vague but constant way it always did when he was deployed. He thinks about Max and Isobel and is glad they have each other. He thinks about Liz and Kyle and hopes they don’t take this failure too much on themselves. He thinks about Maria, who would have healed best by doing her part to hold him up, and how he has denied her that. He thinks about an ex-boyfriend of his who lost the man he loved at eighteen, and how his life went on.

And time passes.

He closes in on Davies. Plans for catching him. For transport.

Why should a man like Walter Davies—an abuser, a murderer, a torturer—get to live his life? The question feels so childish ringing through his mind on record-skipping repeat. Why do bad people exist? It’s not worth dignifying with a fucking answer. Just with action.

Why should Walter Davies get to live if the energy of his life could save Michael’s? If killing him makes Max strong enough to heal whatever’s wrong, or if that energy could be poured straight into Michael somehow—

Alex will hold his hand around the knife to make it happen.

The universe, however, intercedes on behalf of Walter Davies. For the first time in a week, Alex’s phone rings.

“Alex,” Liz breathes, all shock and exhaustion. “Thank god.”

Numb, Alex gets straight to the point. “Is it over, then.”

“Where are you?”

“Less than a day’s drive.”

She sighs. “Okay. Good. We have—we have one last thing we’re going to try before the backup plan. And I think—I think you should be here.”

“What is it.”

“We tried a few things on Noah’s pod with the understanding that it must be organic and found that with a few modifications to my serum, we could create a poison that made it begin to decay. Since—since Michael’s is still fully attached to his body while it’s forming, we, _I_ think that if we dose him with the serum, his altered cells won’t be able to continue to build it, and it’ll start to die off. Then, once it’s detached, we give him the antidote and hope it jump starts his system.”

Alex is quiet for too long. What is he supposed to say? Point out everything that could go wrong and rip away what might be the last chance they have for fifty years?

“Of course, there are risks.” Liz’s voice catches, and he hopes she has someone there to hold her. “There’s no guarantee the serum won’t kill him before he’s free of the pod or that the antidote will wake him up when his body realizes that circumstances have changed. There’s no guarantee of anything at all. But we’ve done as many tests on the pod and on his cells as we have time for, and I think. I think this will work, Alex.”

Michael told him once that hope was a dangerous thing. More than once. He used to say it all the time. Hunched over Flint’s old guitar; in a whisper, pointed at the stars. Teasing, into the thin skin of Alex’s inner thigh. Bitter and old beneath the brim of his hat when Alex parked himself in his life and refused to leave again.

“Do it,” Alex says, hangs up on her, and turns around.

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

There is no dramatic reunion. By the time Alex gets there, the serum has been administered, and he descends the ladder into utter chaos.

They stripped the bed and covered it in plastic sheeting before dosing him, anticipating the proto-pod’s breakdown might not be pretty. And they were right. It seems absurd to call the scene something out of science fiction—because what are their lives, if not that? But Alex has no other word for it, as he rolls up his sleeves and joins Max and Maria around the bed, where Michael.

Where Michael lays.

In the days since Alex left him, he’s…changed. Curled up into himself, arms crossed, knees up to his stomach, position compact, fetal, well-suited for fitting inside the pod. The webbing encasing him has thickened, but not so much that it looks anything like a finished pod, clean and smooth. Dying, it’s _disgusting_ to the touch—like a sort of slimy leather as it peels back from Michael’s skin, leaving him raw in patches.

Hours, hours they spend scrubbing decaying, darkening alien sludge from Michael’s skin as that skin turns white and gray. As his breathing gets harsher and stronger before it starts to fail, pulling out of the ethereal stillness of stasis and tipping straight over into nosedive.

As he dies.

Alex doesn’t have time to be grateful that he fell into the middle of action. That no one has the time to call him a coward or tell him he doesn’t deserve to be at Michael’s bedside. Kyle even spares him a nod, Isobel too, Maria, a warm and firm grip to his arm, and Max, Max wraps him up in a bear hug, almost clawing at his back he holds so tight, bulk shuddering in the embrace. Alex blinks, shocked, so filthy a smear of _something_ threatens to stick his eyelashes shut to his cheek, before Max releases him and gets back to work.

Liz stands ready with a timer and the antidote in a syringe fitted with a silver needle. Michael’s limbs sprawl loose from the fetal position that seems to be the natural state within the pod, and his eyes flick a mad rhythm behind his closed lids. Biting back a hysterical urge to laugh, Alex picks a gummy chunk of the once-hardened outer shell out of Michael’s wet, matted hair. Maria switches out cloth after cloth for clean ones as she wipes at his eyes, his nose, his mouth, to keep them all clear. Kyle, jaw set, monitors Michael’s spiking and plummeting vitals.

“Move,” Liz snaps through the chaos, shoulders in, and jams the needle into Michael’s chest, working the injection site furiously to get it to spread.

And then.

They wait.

Clean him up some more, if only because there’s nothing else to do.

Alex doesn’t think. Not as he wipes the last of the disgusting dead cocoon from Michael’s skin. Not as his vitals stabilize. Not as time and time passes, and he still doesn’t wake up.

Kyle replaces the acetone IV, and he claps Alex on the shoulder. He has a wary confidence of things going according to plan, but Alex doesn’t—can’t trust it. Can’t trust anything.

The bruising that had mottled Michael’s entire body looks like it hasn’t healed a day since it was sealed. Alex fits his hand over the boot-shaped bruise wrapped lovingly around his side and pulls it away before he convinces himself it’s every bit as warm as it should be.

It happens when his hand leaves Michael’s skin. He—

His head jerks to the side; he coughs, chest rattling as he _chokes,_ and Alex jumps to his feet, looks around for Kyle, who has already leapt into motion to check Michael’s airways, if he aspirated any of that shit despite Maria’s best efforts—

And then Michael opens his eyes.

Max and Isobel shoulder in, sobbing and clinging as Michael coughs some more and swings his head side to side, croaks a question, then lets himself sink back into his siblings’ arms, eyes falling shut. Alex backs away towards the wall to give them their moment. Michael shouldn’t feel crowded. It’s clear he’s confused enough as it is, unable to really speak as he croaks again, coughs, and Kyle has water ready for him. He drinks greedily, and when he tries to speak again it’s more of a rasp, and as soon as the cup is drained he’s clinging back to his siblings, forehead buried in both their shoulders, his own shoulders shaking.

Until he jerks up sharply, struggling until Isobel and Max pull back too, and Michael searches, face frantic, until he finds Alex pressed into the corner. He _lunges_ , as best as he can, against the IV line in his arm, against the arms of his siblings, toward Alex, arms outstretched. He croaks again, a strained and desperate sound, and his hand twitches Alex’s way, and—

Alex’s hand is on the ladder rungs before his brain connects to his body to stop him from running, running, running. Facing Michael now—it’s impossible to touch him, to smile at him through tears, like they’re reuniting something that broke cleanly.

He needs his family. He needs someone who isn’t Alex to hold his hand without squeezing too tight, because next time Alex gets his hands on him he has to, he has to, do _something_ to prove to himself that all of this is real.

Alex hauls himself out of the hatch and collapses on floor in front of the couch, grips his knees with shaking hands, counting breaths. In for four, out for four. Calm. The fuck. Down. Awake. Alive. The cure worked, and Michael is, he’s going to be—

His counting stutters and his breath with it, and he folds up around his aching stomach and _sobs,_ all the walls he built up to keep the grief at bay collapsing at once and drowning him in the flood. He’d _howl_ if his lungs had the strength for it, but even those muscles shake too hard for anything but the smallest, thinnest sips of air to feed his blood. He cries for every dropped beat, every sliver of time at midnight when Michael might have slipped away without Alex there to hold him. He cries out the life he made himself acclimate to living, killing hope before it could kill him, lances it, bleeds it out of his head and his chest to make room for the old life coming back in. He cries for himself, for excruciating relief, for the cramped-up agony of joy, for _Michael._

He cries until the little things come creeping back in, like how his ass hurts from sitting on the hard wooden floor, like how gross it is to have a nose this runny, like how he’s glad that Buffy is at Kyle’s so he didn’t upset her too badly with his breakdown. He sniffles and wipes his eyes and doesn’t even care about his dignity as he tries to pick himself up and laughs until he’s almost in tears all over again. No one is here to see him anyway; they’re all still downstairs, with Michael, where they belong, to check him over, to talk to him, to hold him. The immediate emergency dealt with, he still has a road to recovery from what was done to him.

And Alex still has a road of his own.

Wiping his raw face one last time, Alex shuffles to his bathroom to wash his face and hands, then to the bedroom, not bothering to close the door behind him. Methodically, he changes his filthy shirt for a clean one and lays out his clothes in neat lines on his bed to be packed. He primes the gun safe while he goes to the kitchen to refresh his travel food necessities. Last time, he left in a hurry, without thinking, with no plan except the cold, black fury beating against his skull. He’ll be more prepared this time. He has to be, if he wants his father neutralized for good.

There’s no more room for indecision, for threats and blackmail and bribery. His father won’t stop, will never repent. Michael is awake and alive, and that’s how he’s going to stay, so Alex has no more distractions. He’s seen those golden eyes again, even dark and glassy with pain and confusion, and that’s enough. He doesn’t need to feel Michael’s touch sunbaked and soothing against his skin or hear his name said in that loving, teasing voice. He doesn’t deserve it. Not yet. Consider it something to aspire to instead. Once the war is over.

The safe chirps, and Alex goes back to the other room to open it, retrieves his gun and ammunition, and packs it away. He’ll be starting the hunt from scratch, most likely. A frustrating time loss, but it can be borne. Alex has always preferred the marathon to the sprint, and there’s a particular coiled satisfaction at the prospect of running his father to ground, then running him some more, circling in closer and closer until the better hunter moves in for the kill.

Defense is the trickier thing. What’s to keep Dad from going after Michael again, particularly in his weakened state? Or going after someone else instead—Maria, Liz, Rosa, Kyle, Mimi, Arturo? Breaking off from them isn’t enough. Dad will never think anything but the softest of him. Alex grinds his teeth, knowing he would be right.

Max and Isobel are his only real option. They’ll protect the town; they’ll be more vigilant this time. Keep everyone safe. Keep Michael—

Oh, Michael.

Michael won’t…he won’t understand. Alex clears his throat of the lump starting to form there, like he has any more tears left to give.

The first thing he did was reach for you, and you ran away again.

Go ahead. Leave him. You’ve had how many trial runs now, how many dress rehearsals? You’ve immunized yourself to loneliness and grief.

Leave him. You know how easy it is once it’s done. Hell, look at his track record; he might even forgive you again. Who cares what he wants or thinks that he needs? Your father _tortured_ him, and he’ll do it again if you don’t do something.

If you don’t do something, it’ll be your fault when the next gift your father gives you is his corpse.

If you don’t want your toys to be broken, stop leaving them lying around.

His father’s voice rips through his cascading thoughts so violently his hands shake and drop the clothes he was rolling. It hits him like the dead weight of Michael’s body falling from the back of his car, and horror at himself is on its heels.

Of course his father isn’t going to stop. He was never going to stop. The confrontation has been inevitable from the very first day he covered a bruise with makeup—not because he was ashamed of it, not because he wanted to hide the evidence of his father’s cruelty, but because he could think of no greater retaliation than denying him the satisfaction of seeing his pain.

How could he be so shortsighted? Every baying instinct may demand he run his prey to ground, but Alex has always prided himself on being smarter than that. He _knows_ that Dad has eyes on the roads in and out of town. The second he left Roswell, he’d be at a disadvantage.

And besides. Even if Michael did forgive him…

Who the hell does he think he is? A man who makes promises just to break them? To throw away all the progress he and Michael have made now wouldn’t be a necessary sacrifice. It would be a surrender.

What do you do when paranoia isn’t enough?

You stop fooling yourself into thinking one person has to be.

Staying here, where he has allies and the lay of the land, isn’t a stupid choice just because the results are less immediate, just because the thought of letting Dad control the rules of engagement makes him itch. He lost his chance to be a lone wolf a long time ago, when he became a migratory thing, flying away just to return to roost when the season was warm and right.

He primes the safe again and puts his gun away.

When he returns to the main room, he has a full house. Max holds Isobel on the couch, their heads tilted together, both of them still shaking with silent tears. Maria is just coming up from below; she hugs Alex tightly as she passes him on her way to the bathroom, and he lets her bear some of his weight, just briefly, taking hers in return. Liz is next up, fire in her eyes, bag full of samples from Michael and from the dead pod, headed right for the lab.

Finally, Kyle comes up too. He runs his hand through his hair and grins a tired grin, bounding over to Alex to hug him too.

“I figure, same schedule of check ups we used for Isobel last time,” he says. “We need to watch closely for changes, of course, but we’re almost in the clear. He’s completely alert, and,” he squeezes Alex’s arm, “trying really hard not to ask for you. Maybe go to him?”

Still with no more tears left to give, Alex has to rely on words. So he squeezes Kyle back and manages, “Thank you. For everything.”

And Kyle replies, “No. That’s just what family is for.”

Michael is alive and awake, and hopefully that means this is the last time Alex will go down this ladder for a while—or at least it will feel less like a descent into hell, heart in his throat with every rung, clenching dread in his stomach that at the bottom lies nothing but grief and despair.

Michael is awake. He’s alive. Alex twists his hands on the ladder rungs and forces himself to be calm before he reaches the bottom and turns around to see Michael in bed, weak but alert, an acetone IV in his arm. The plastic sheeting is gone, replaced with new bedding from one of the cabinets against the wall.

“You’re here,” Michael says.

Alex clears his throat. “Yeah. I—I didn’t leave. Not really, I was just—upstairs. I’m—”

“C’mere.”

Alex eats up the floor in a few quick strides, but he hesitates before dropping down into the same chair he kept watch from, still angled towards the bed like it hasn’t been touched since he left it, or like whoever took his place, Isobel, Max, Maria, left it just so out of respect. His jaw twitches at the thought of sitting there again, at the awful, voyeuristic inches of space between the chair and the bed and Michael still helpless within it.

“Not there,” Michael says, like he can read Alex’s mind, and when Alex cuts his eyes over Michael smiles at him best he can, a pale imitation of the usual thing, and smooths his hand across the bed beside him. “Room for two?” His voice lilts up at the end, making it a question, one Alex answers with his body as he climbs into that welcome space. Michael sighs when Alex settles somewhat stiffly against him, not sure where to touch that isn’t injured or too tender from the pod stuff sloughing off him, not sure where to look that isn’t obsessively staring at every minute movement of every inch of him.

Michael takes his hand, and Alex weaves their fingers together, shuddering with relief.

“Michael,” he manages, before emotion chokes him off again and he has to regroup.

“Yeah,” Michael replies, no steadier.

Where are the words? All that time to prepare, and he has nothing. He can’t even remember what the last thing he wanted to tell him was, and there must have been something. What else would he have been thinking of on that plane ride back to Roswell, if not for going home to work, to Buffy, and to Michael? And all the nights he’s spent this past week staring at the ceiling until his eyes crossed and saw constellations in the popcorn paint, he could have put that time to good use instead and written himself a speech.

Because all he has now is _I’m sorry_ and a handful of languages to say it in, and all of them are inadequate at best. 

He pulls Michael’s hand to his cheek instead of speaking, tips his face into the touch and basks in the warmth in the palm of that hand. Michael’s breath hitches. Alex is close enough to hear him, but still not close enough. Nothing will be until every sound he hears is Michael’s steady heartbeat.

“’M falling asleep. But wanted to wait for you,” Michael murmurs. His hair is starting to dry, frizzing up a little, and Alex reaches up to skim his fingers through, catch on the tangles and work them gently.

Alex whispers, “Sleep, then. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

In the heartbeat it takes for Michael’s eyelids to fall shut, Alex holds his breath. Sleep is too much like the other thing for him to get comfortable. So he stays awake, Michael’s head tucked into the crook of his shoulder, and hugs him, relishing each occasional little wheeze that catches in his throat, every weird muscle jerk, and the _weight_ of him as he sinks into Alex’s body. Restless sleep has never been so restful, settling more and more of Alex’s jagged pieces.

Underground, no light shifts to mark the passage of time, and there are no clocks ticking by. Alex has his phone, but to check it he would have to move, and the thought is abhorrent, so he just…drifts. Untethers himself from the dock, from the nagging buzz in his brain begging him to _plan_ something, prepare something. He has Michael, here in his arms. He has _himself_ again, occupying his own emptiness. It’s time to regroup. To heal.

Eventually, Michael stirs in Alex’s arms, and Alex releases him to stretch, smiling when he sinks right back into the embrace.

“Hey,” Michael whispers. His thumb brushes Alex’s cheekbone softly, reverently, and Alex turns to kiss it just the same, skims his lips down to rest on the fragile tracery of veins at the nape of his wrist, the heat there half blood, half angry, fading ligature burn.

Voice hitching, Alex starts, “I’m--”

Michael cuts him off. “Don’t apologize. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry, Michael.”

“It’s--”

“It’s not okay. Don’t you dare say that it’s okay.”

“No. It isn’t. I don’t think either of us are. But considering the circumstances…” he gestures vaguely at some bruised part of him; anywhere he indicates works just as well. “I think feeling that way is pretty damn good.”

Alex clenches his fist hard enough for his nails to bite into his palm. “I’m going to kill him,” he seethes, “before he ever touches you again. Before you even have to be afraid of it. I wasn’t here last time, but I won’t get caught off guard again.”

Accomplices, surveillance, personnel files, he’s proven now that there’s nowhere for his father to hide when Alex truly wants him found. He isn’t going to fail again.

“Hell yeah, sounds like a plan,” Michael rasps. “But pump the breaks ‘til I’m in manhunting shape. One jumping jack might dissolve my bones right now, okay.”

“What?”

A muscle ticks in Michael’s jaw, but his voice stays forced and light. “Crashing your party, Private. You’re not leaving me behind if you’re doing something that’s gonna get you hurt.”

“No! No.” Alex palms his chest, twists his fingers in the hospital gown. “I’m not leaving. Michael. Leaving is what got us into this situation. I just have to be prepared. I have to be ready.”

“It _wasn’t your fault,_ Alex.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s still my responsibility.”

“Bull _shit_ it is.” Michael grips the hand on his chest, pins Alex’s between his hand and his body. “You know what got me through the—Thinking about you, okay? That’s what kept me going. Knowing that if you were safe you’d come for me, and even if you didn’t, I could imagine this whole—this whole life for you. I could sink into thoughts of you and Buffy old and gray and nothing there could touch me. You already took responsibility for me, Alex. You already took care of me.”

“No,” he repeats, weaker this time.

“Yes.”

“No, you don’t understand. I didn’t—it was Max and Isobel. Maria. Liz and Kyle. I left. I _left_ you, Michael, when you could have died at any minute. I didn’t even think about it—I was so _angry._ If you’d died—if you’d woken up and I wasn’t here—” He tears off with a gasp his lungs can’t hold onto properly, chest squeezing tight around the flood of words.

“But I didn’t,” Michael says. His jaw is fixed, eyes glittering when he turns his head to look straight into Alex’s. “And you’re here _now._ I don’t care about anything else. You’re here.”

“You can’t. You can’t not care. I thought you were—I thought I was _avenging_ you, Michael. You don’t know…”

“Fuck, Alex, what do you want me to say?” His voice turns pleading, now, and it’s worse. “I just want to be with you. In this hole in the ground beneath your house, where no one can touch us. Can’t we have that? Just for a while?”

“I want that. I want that too. I _do._ But I can’t stop thinking that the next time my father gets to one of us, we won’t survive it. That I have to be better, stronger, smarter, or you’ll be gone, and it will be my fault.”

“Stop.”

Alex shakes his head, a helpless laugh cracking down his sternum. Michael was dying, an hour ago, a day ago, a week ago he was tied to the dirt in some godforsaken cell at the mercy of a monster, and the first thing Alex does when he has him again is pick a fight because he can’t—he’s too selfish—can’t just let something _go?_ Every word is an apology, and every apology is wrong, but he doesn’t have anything else inside to give up to balance the scale. To make things _right_ in a way his brain can comprehend.

“You’re my _family,”_ he tries, one last time, to make Michael understand.

“Then at least let me share some of the weight!”

“What?”

Michael turns toward him as best he can and moves closer, slides his leg between Alex’s knees, slides his hand up Alex’s torso to rest palm-down just over his heart. Alex gapes at him in disbelief.

“I know we haven’t since Iz and I learned how. I haven’t with—anyone. Didn’t know how to ask you. But it would let you see how I see you. Let you know where to find me, too. It might…help.”

Alex goes cold, ice-water shock crashing through his veins, and he drops their joined hands and scoots an inch or two away. Moving only makes him _colder,_ an awful, sucking vacuum of air against skin that flushed to Michael’s closeness.

Michael, who recoils slightly in his turn, face hardening to a mask. He sniffles; his mouth tightens into a strained line, before he plasters on an unconcerned mask and waits for Alex to say something.

Through numb lips, he says, “You—you don’t want that.”

Michael stares at him, the only part of him moving his lips when he talks. Alex shudders at the stillness and grabs for him again, not trusting his ears, needing to feel the warmth of him, like it could be taken away at any moment. And Michael lets himself be grabbed, pushing into it, twisting their fingers back together so his thumb can go back to worrying against his knuckles, and Alex sighs with relief, letting his forehead fall against Michael’s chest.

Michael talks into his hair, breath tickling his ear. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t. But if _you_ don’t want it—don’t want me in your head—”

“It’s not that. Michael.” Alex grips him with both hands, ducks to kiss the backs of his fingers, skims his nose across his knuckles before pulling back up, unable to restrain himself from that extra little touch. “I want every part of you. I want it all the time. I’ll never be satisfied—I want it too much.”

“Not possible.”

“But I don’t know if I can—if I can _let_ you want the same of me. It doesn’t feel safe; it feels like if I give in to wanting you like this, you’ll learn…”

“Learn what?”

How is one supposed to speak in a confessional? Loud, proclaiming yourself with the expectation of forgiveness? Quiet, like you’re still trying to keep a secret from God? Michael shifts, the line of acetone into his arm tugging as he brings his unoccupied hand to brush Alex’s cheekbone so, so gently Alex almost wants to flinch from it.

Finally, he speaks like he always does, no matter how hard he tries to corral his thoughts into the kind of eloquence Michael makes look effortless.

“I’m not _good,_ ” he blurts. “I mean—I’m not a hero. Not even close; I’m so angry, all the time, and I’ve done things. In the military, and, fuck, last week. I don’t want you to see me differently, but I don’t know how to handle the way you _do_ see me.” He lets out a pathetic, watery laugh. Michael’s hand is still steady against his cheek. He doesn’t interrupt, just lets Alex speak. “I don’t want to be that person, but how long can I keep denying that I am? Walker, Davies, Flint—it wasn’t even _hard._ I did it easily. I’d do it again.”

“You were defending someone you—” Michael pauses and licks his lips, “—love.” Like he had to roll the word out slowly, so it didn’t come out like a question, and Alex loves him, loves him, loves him. “A lot of people would do terrible things. For justice or revenge or pure, selfish desperation. Hell, most of us have. I have. You know exactly how many bodies I’ve buried. And anger? Hell.” He sighs hard enough to shake his entire body. “I’ve been angry my entire life.”

Alex shakes his head. Doesn’t let himself hide his face back in Michael’s chest and give in to a—a seductive absolution just because it’s coming from Michael’s outstretched hand. “But what happens when the excuses run out? When the battles are over but I still want to keep winning? What is that going to make me? Out of all the shit we have to be afraid of, the thing I’m most afraid of is myself. And—and of you. If we do the handprint thing, if I let you in like that, and you see everything that’s twisted up inside me, and it’s too much—makes it so you don’t feel _safe_ with me anymore? I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t think I’d survive it.”

As gaunt as Michael still looks, deep, sunken shadows beneath his bloodshot eyes, skin greyed and bruised, lips cracked and ragged, he _shines_ from every pore to Alex’s eyes, as he blinks so slowly and smiles at him, a warm, tilting smile, an openly adoring gaze. Alex almost shrinks from it. It’s too much. It’s always so much. He’s never, ever ready, and being deprived of it has been—has been—

Michael says, “Hey. There is nothing about you that could make me feel unsafe, okay? Nothing.”

 _Liar._ Voice high and tight, Alex says, “My father abducted and tortured you, Michael. How can you say that with a straight face? My presence in your life actively endangers you.”

“He did that because I’m an _alien._ If you’d never been born, he’d still hunt us.”

“He targeted you because—"

“Okay, yeah, maybe so. But if we weren’t together, there’s still a one in three chance he goes for me anyway, on the off chance he’s only taking one. And.” As if to soften the blow of his next words, Michael pauses to rub his thumb tenderly across Alex’s jaw, and Alex clenches against it all the same, closing his eyes to brace himself. “Alex, if it came to it. I’m sorry, but you know, you know I would always want it to be like this instead of it being Max or Isobel. I can’t change that about myself. I wouldn’t want to.”

“I know,” Alex chokes. “I know that. You think I don’t feel the same? That I haven’t spent every second wishing it was me in that bed instead of you?”

“We’re both kind of assholes that way, yeah.”

Alex tries to unwind some of the tension in his body, curling closer into Michael, not hiding but letting himself seek comfort in the familiarity of his skin, his smell, the returning normalness of him.

“We’ve fought so hard to get to where we are right now, and through all of it, I’ve never been _afraid_ of you. You’ve always been the kid who saw me and reached out, even when we were both being a hundred other things. We’ve made it this far—I don’t think that’s going to change.”

Swallowing the piercing ache of emotion in his throat, Alex says, “You say that now. You can’t know what I could do someday.”

“Neither can you.”

Alex looks away at that. He would pull away from the bed, from Michael, if it wasn’t for the impossible gravity of loving him.

“Hey,” Michael says, touching his jaw so, so gently Alex has to swallow back his tears again. He’s too weak to even try to turn Alex to face him, something Alex takes full advantage of to keep staring at something less soul-searching than Michael’s beautiful, battered face.

Or maybe he just wanted to touch him. Either way, Alex leans his cheek into his hand and closes his eyes.

Michael says, “Hey. You asked me once if we even knew each other, and I didn’t have a good answer. But I have one now. We’re learning to know each other. Every day, I know you a little bit better, and it doesn’t matter to me if the things I’m learning are ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ because they’re _you._ By the time we run out of battles to fight, I’m going to know you so well you won’t be able to get lost, because I’ll be there to hold onto you. Yeah?”

Alex laughs his crying laugh again and tries to wipe his eyes without letting go of Michael’s hand. It’s just insane how Michael can _say_ these things, the way he talks like stargazing, picking constellations out of the infinite possibility of patterns.

“I want that. I want to know you the same way.” He kisses the back of Michael’s hand again and gets rewarded with a tired but broad smile.

And fuck if that doesn’t do it, doesn’t ignite a helpless fluttering of hope in the pit of Alex’s stomach, and he kisses Michael’s forehead, just beside the stubborn curl that always falls just over his eye.

“I love you,” he says, and the words are everything—a prayer, a mantra, a protest.

“I _am_ pretty amazing. And wise. And sexy…”

“And pushing your luck.”

“Always, baby.”

“Shut up.”

“Never.”

Michael has the nerve to flutter his eyelashes at that, a move so like Isobel that Alex _laughs,_ for real this time, hard enough to feel his eyes crinkle at the corners, and it makes his heart go wild with adrenaline. He thought, really and truly, that he would never laugh like this again. And even if he can’t quite believe some of the beautiful things Michael says, he believes in this.

Michael dozes off shortly after, still so drained. They haven’t decided anything or made an actual _plan,_ but Alex’s system is still so overtaxed from the past week that he just…can’t feel the kind of stress he ought to feel at the vulnerability. A decision on the handprint plan can wait. Can wait for Michael to sleep, can wait for Alex to hold him.

He looks close to fragile, as close as Alex is to him, all tucked up against his side. He can’t move. Can’t make himself. So he falls asleep there too, in the process of trying to sear Michael’s image onto his retinas. Just in case.

Just in case.

* * *

They wake up alive. Who’d’ve thought.

Alex helps Michael sit up, and even that is a process after so long in one place. Michael grits his teeth against powerlessness, but Alex is—almost glad that he’s too weak to hold himself up for long. He slides in behind Michael to hold him against his chest in a seated position, and they stay like that for a time. Every movement takes the effort of a titan; every touch lingers for what feels like eternity. All the time they almost lost is coming back to them. It takes some getting used to.

Even if walking might be a ways off for Michael, they still find themselves taking a few tentative first steps. It starts with Alex dozing under the always-hypnotic blanket of Michael’s body heat, with the lullaby rhythm of the strong heartbeat he can feel through Michael’s back. Michael strokes the arms around him, holding him close, and talks to fill the time.

They talk about nothing; about what Michael wants to eat for his first meal back among the living, about how Alex’s talks went in Virginia, something he has to wrack his brain for far too long to answer. But Michael is patient, through all the too-long silences, seeming content to just be held. And Alex doesn’t budge, even when Kyle comes in to check Michael over, and Kyle doesn’t comment, just gives them both a warm and knowing look.

“I’m going to remove the IV to make you more comfortable,” he says, “But you need to let me know immediately if the pain becomes unmanageable.”

“Self-medicating is, like, a hobby. I’m good,” Michael rasps, and Kyle shoots him a look of withering disapproval, and Michael just laughs. Alex squeezes his arm minutely around Michael’s middle, prompting a dramatic _oof_ and another laugh.

“Well, I can put ‘high spirits’ on the chart, at least,” Kyle snarks, but he’s wearing a smile of his own.

Kyle stays one more night, in case Michael takes a turn, but that turn never comes. His strength comes back in a steady trickle, if a tense and choked one, anxiety zipping between himself and Alex every time he tries to move something and it doesn’t respond. The antidote works, but slowly. He’s awake, he’s alive, but this—this is something like a nightmare for him, too, Alex knows.

And all he can do is be there. He’s as _there_ as he can possibly manage, never more than an arms-length away, a glutton for touch, greedy to hear anything Michael has to say.

The next day, Michael stands on weak and wobbly legs and declares himself a cured man.

“It’s a miracle, Doc,” he says, and almost pitches sideways and knocks himself unconscious on the bedpost. Alex and Kyle grab him and steady him, exchanging exasperated looks.

But Kyle surprises Alex when he thinks for a minute and says, “If we can get you up the ladder, a little bit of sunlight would be good for you. God knows I’m sick of this place; you must be going out of your mind.”

“Got it in one, McDreamy.”

“Do you ever stop? Even a little bit?”

“I can stop when I’m dead.”

“Too soon.”

They manage to wrangle Michael up the ladder, kitten-weak and shaking as he is, squalling the whole way about his shattered dignity. Alex has to pull him the last couple rungs, and it ends with them both on the floor, Michael in his arms, and it feels so good, the air fresh for all the cabin is perpetually dusty, the smell of old wood all around them, Alex tucks his leg across the back of Michael’s knees to keep him there.

“By the way,” Kyle says, brushing his pants off as he stands up, “There’s someone here to see you.”

Alex clutches a fistful of the back of Michael’s shirt, ready all at once to flip them over, to shield him with his body, to—

Kyle opens the door to the bedroom, and the second it cracks there’s a loud _boof_ and all twenty pounds of Buffy is forcing her way through, scrambling with her claws on the wood floor over to Alex and Michael, to lick both their faces with all the energy she can muster. Michael wriggles one of his arms free to hug her without moving from his place on Alex’s chest.

“I have to get to work. Max and Isobel are on standby if you need anything.” Kyle walks to the door, pats Buffy on the head on his way and gets a licked hand for his trouble, and pauses before opening it. “Take care of yourselves.”

Then he’s gone, and Michael and Alex are alone once more.

In the quiet broken only by Buffy’s little snuffling noises as she continues her inspection of them head to toe, Michael says, “Y’know, I think he really likes me.”

Alex buries his grin in the nest of Michael’s hair.

They stay there on the floor for too long, long enough for them both to get stiff and laugh at each other for being old—and not for any of the other reasons—when they struggle to get up. Fatigue weighs at every tiny movement Michael makes, so Alex puts him right down on the couch, and goes to find something to eat.

His fridge is stocked to the brim, Mimi’s old piecemeal Tupperware, takeout containers labeled in Liz’s careful labelling hand. He grabs something at random, a recently-dated thing of soup, and throws it in the microwave.

While it heats, he thumbs open his phone. Clears all the detritus of old messages, notifications, and starts anew.

He sends _thank you, for everything._ To everyone who came together. He has no other words.

The microwave beeps, and Alex takes the food out into the sitting room, where Michael is resting horizontal on the couch, head tipped back, hand slowly stroking Buffy where she’s laying on his knees, staring at him with massive, soulful eyes. He turns his head and smiles when Alex comes back in the room, still wan and a little sunken-looking, but less like death in the sun coming through the windows.

“What’s that?” Michael says, and nods at the backpack Alex threw down by the couch when he arrived in the midst of the chaos.

Alex keeps his face neutral. Leans his hip against the arm, hands Michael the bowl, and says placidly, “It’s nothing. Work stuff.”

Michael accepts this with a shrug. He doesn’t bother with the spoon Alex left in the bowl for him, drinking it down instead.

His easy acceptance of being brushed off, it—it digs his claws into Alex’s heart, and he—he—

Baby steps. Okay? This week may have been one massive detour that catapulted them back behind the starting line, but that doesn’t mean he can’t keep moving forward.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts. “That was a lie. I don’t know why—”

Lying again. He knows. The lie was a reflex, to shield Michael from any reminder of his own ordeal, to give Alex time to gather information and orchestrate a plan of attack. But what? Is he going to lie again when he sneaks off to the Project Shepherd bunker to watch the tapes? Lie again, hide what he knows, when Michael is ready to recount what happened for himself?

Lying, deflecting, these things are familiar. Survivalist, even. But the habit of a lifetime can’t keep him from tracing cause and effect from this one little lie to a dozen fights, to sowed mistrust, to—

“I’m sorry,” he repeats.

Buffy raises her head and whines softly.

Michael puts the bowl on the ground, touches Alex’s wrist, then when he doesn’t pull away, pulls that arm across himself, to rest against his chest, pressing a kiss to the crook of his elbow. A little gasp jumps into Alex’s throat at the tender gesture.

He closes his eyes. Easier to talk without seeing the look on Michael’s face. “It’s everything. All the digital data and surveillance collected on you. I couldn’t stand the thought of you as a lab rat, I couldn’t—”

“So that’s what you were doing. When you said you left.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you—have you watched it?”

“No. I didn’t have the equipment on the road, and I only came back when—”

“When someone told you that the cure could kill me.”

“Yeah.”

Michael sighs, a whisper of warm air that skim the sensitive skin in the bend of his elbow and sends goosebumps shivering up his arm. He leans his head into Alex’s bicep, the stubble of his cheek a welcome roughness, the weight of his head so trusting it _aches._ Alex opens his eyes to drink in more than the sensation of it and finds Michael looking back at him with closed-off, shining eyes.

“I’m going to ask something of you,” Michael says.

Alex swallows and nods. Prepares his deposition.

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t watch the tapes.”

“I—”

“Please, Alex.”

Alex licks his lips, struggles for seconds that stretch out too long to answer. Finally, weakly, he says, “I need to know. I can’t just—I _want_ to say yes. I want to give you anything you need. But I can’t—I can’t—”

“I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everything. Anything. All you have to do is ask.”

“I don’t want to make you relive it; that’s fucking awful. I can’t—”

Couldn’t have. Ever. Talked about a single day, what happened when he came home from school, the fear and the pain and the constant, squirming humiliation. And he and Michael are two of a kind. Michael can talk, but he reduces, deflects, he’ll try and make Alex feel better when all he wants is to feel _raw._

“Do you need to know, or do you think you need to punish yourself?” Michael demands. “Isn’t that exactly what your dad would want? Alex.” His voice gentles. More than Alex deserves, frankly, more than he wants. It feels too much like pity, like ants crawling on his skin. He wants to rip his arm out of Michael’s grip, but he’s afraid he would leave too much behind.

“I won’t make you tell me,” Alex says. “You can’t sit there and say this wasn’t _literally_ your worst nightmare. What kind of person would I be to make you talk about that?”

“Words are just _words,_ Alex. I can say them once, you’ll know what you want to know, and we can move on! Words aren’t _video evidence._ Maybe—maybe I want someone to be there through the nightmares who can tell me it was just a dream and not be lying through their teeth.”

If Alex—If Alex were sitting like Michael is now, with his head cradled in Michael’s strong arm, he’d be eye level with—with the kind of track marks that leave streaks of bruising, yellow and green, Alex saw them when helping him change out of the hospital gown and into his own clothes.

He wants to say _no._ He wants—even if Michael is right, and he is, Alex knows that he is, he doesn’t care if it’s self-indulgent self-flagellation, he _wants_ the pain, wants to hear the screams Flint put in his imagination, wants to whet himself on that stone.

He wants to share the weight.

“I think…when you’re ready,” Alex says slowly. “I won’t watch the tapes, okay? I won’t. But when you’re ready.” He turns his arm so he can thread their fingers together, putting them palm to palm. “I want you to show me. Face it the two of us, together.”

Michael’s lips part, and Alex wants to swallow whatever words will come next.

“You mean that?”

“I do. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine?”

“Oh my god, I’m a terrible influence.”

Michael laughs, a genuine laugh that almost disguises the glassiness of his eyes, the catch of emotion in his throat. Alex laughs along with him, along with the tug to his arm that has him tumbling half-over Michael’s chest, the plucking hands on his clothes until Alex is crawling over Michael and Buffy both, to the dog’s pointed disapproval, to squeeze beside Michael, the two of them plastered together on the narrow couch, limbs finding new places to settle, to accommodate the other.

Alex closes his eyes and touches Michael without fear. Michael doesn’t speak again, doesn’t need to, his gentle fingers speaking for him.

They stay there for the rest of the day, in the warm space their two bodies make twined together, committing each other to memory, and writing over everything else.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic beat me up and stole my lunch money i hope you guys enjoy :)


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